‘This is the End’

What do you end up with when you put Seth Rogan, James Franco, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill and Craig Robinson under one roof while the Rapture is going on outside, turning the Hollywood Hills and (presumably) the rest of the world into ashes and hellfire? Fortunately, you get what is undoubtedly one of the funniest movies of the year, nay, of the past decade.

“This is the End” features a truly ingenious cast in an equally ingenious premise: All of the above mentioned celebrities play obnoxious, cantankerous, whiney versions of themselves trapped inside James Franco’s luxurious Hollywood home — definitely not the worst place you could hold up during the apocalypse.

All of them are there to begin with because they are partying with all of their famous friends, including, but not limited to: a perverted, coked-up Michael Cera who is hitting on Rihanna, Jason Segel, who laments the predictability of working on a network show like “How I Met Your Mother,” Emma “Hermoine Granger” Watson, who scores some of the biggest laughs in the film, and Paul Rudd, who accidentally steps on and crushes a girl’s skull once the chaos begins.

And once it begins, things get very bad and uproariously funny very quickly, with a bunch of hilarious actors lampooning their own careers, and their ineptitude and spoiled lifestyles in the face of such apocalyptic challenges as food and water shortages, lack of masturbation privacy, demonic possession, and loss of humanity.

That last one is important in this film, because the very reason why none of these guys has been Raptured, or saved, is because they are not worthy. So of course, throughout the movie they figure out they need to correct that and do good things in order to be allowed into the light. Doing good things, selfless things: that ends up being the most daunting task, especially for McBride, who revels in the darkness of his devilish end-of-the-world persona.

“This is the End” is the directorial debut of writing partners Rogan and Evan Goldberg (“Superbad,” “Pineapple Express”), and they nail it. From scene to scene, the film never slows an inch and is incredibly consistent in its timing and laughs. I laughed so hard so many times that I’m sure I missed a number of jokes slipped in there in the dynamite script, which must have left a lot of room, too, for improv — I dare anyone not to lose it when Franco and McBride argue passionately about the overabundance of a particular bodily fluid that Franco has noticed around the house.

In a way, “This is the End” represents everything that last year’s “The Watch,” also co-written by Rogan and Goldberg, should and could have been. Fortunately, now we have a thoroughly funny and successfully mediation on similar ideas, featuring one of the best comedy ensembles I’ve seen and a surprisingly effective and emotional penultimate sequence featuring a certain famous Whitney Houston song I won’t mention by name, but I’m sure you know what it is already.

★★★ 1/2 (out of 4)